Posted
by
simoniker
on Friday July 04, 2003 @08:26AM
from the enticing-portable-alternatives dept.

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to the results and download page for the GP32 15 Days Coding Competition. This competition, to make homebrew games and demos for the intriguing Korean handheld console mentioned previously on Slashdot, provided winners such as Gloop ("..a Lemmings-like puzzle game, only with water!"), Squad 14 ("..one number - 1942! Great looking.. smooth, hundreds of sprites, most of those are bullets"), and Giro ("..the GP32 does Mode 7, lovely rendered graphics make this look stunning.") Good to see homebrew titles flourishing on handheld platforms where development is undeniably legal?

The idea it self is a really great one. One reason the PC is so great is that just about anyone can write something, and distribute it, legally. With consoles and other gaming machines, its illegal to run unsigned code, and a pain in the ass to get the code/software to work. Take the xbox for example, I would love to have Linux on my xbox, and be able to run various other apps that are created, but I don't have enough balls to mod my xbox, or use the new exploits that just came out. A console like this is great, it sort of depends on the community to fuel its game supply. I hope to see more consoles like this.

I agree... open source console makes sense to me too... BUT, is there a way to keep the sandbox unrine free?

I would love to play all kinds of crazy games on my console... but could my console stay safe from getting fried by some stupid script kiddie? Or some poorly coded game that causes the console to become unstable, or tries to update the firmware and fails. Is that possible, should that be a concern?

I think that's a good point. I would imagine some sort of "official" voice of the scene would need to exist to create standards. Like a website that could rate and eliminate low quality games in an unbiased manner. It could allow you to cruise through all the trash when looking for the gems, but still allow access and coverage of the lower quality titles that might offer something innovative and otherwise be looked over.